Category Archives: The Criterion Collection

July 28, 2010

18. The Naked Kiss (1964)

written and directed by Samuel Fuller

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Criterion #18.

This is a very dated, very B movie from 1964. Criterion doesn’t quite say so outright, but it seems clear that this movie is being offered up to present-day audiences so that we might say, “Whoa! This is crazy and wild and surreal in some weird 60s way!” I think this movie has been kept in the public eye by people who think it’s an “it’s kind of amazing!” type of artifact, if you know what I mean.

I don’t deny that it’s a strange movie. It’s erratic in terms of tone and content and technique, and it freely wanders beyond the bounds of taste in many different directions. It is basically riddled from top to bottom with stylistic “errors” — so densely that it begins to feel mysterious and foreign, like maybe it’s actually a forceful and cohesive work by an alien. The lack of good judgment is so thoroughgoing that one’s mind goes seeking for some deeper, weirder guiding principle. And yeah, if you let yourself get lost like that, you can have an “it’s kind of amazing!” experience with this movie.

My problem with it is that I didn’t get very lost. Its weirdness wasn’t quite mysterious enough to revel in; I basically knew where it came from and what each of its pieces was, and why. Its misjudgments are specific to a certain time and place and culture; in their proper milieu they may still have been misjudgments but they probably weren’t particularly striking.

It’s sort of like a piece of folk art. I’ve never been all that affected by folk art, for this same reason. Generally, whatever peculiar aesthetic power it has is too obviously unintentional; I can’t help but be aware that the most interesting juxtapositions are inadvertent symptoms of the artist’s environment (and personal shortcomings). I suppose in a really exceptional piece of folk art, the force of the aesthetic effect would be so great that it is indistinguishable from an intentional effect. That’s a very rare thing. Maybe Henri Rousseau qualifies, but that’s exactly why he’s not thought of as a folk artist. Anyway, I didn’t think The Naked Kiss rose to that level.

I read a guy’s essay online where he was essentially saying that for him, The Naked Kiss does rise to that level, that its peculiarities form a mysterious and transcendent whole that enraptures him with inscrutable dream emotions. I absolutely sympathize with the phenomenon and I can see how this movie might offer it, for some people. But not for me. I just didn’t think it was quite idiot or quite savant enough to escape being merely a dated pulp confusion. I get who this filmmaker was and what was on his cluttered 1964 mind.

Apparently some French filmmakers of the era thought Samuel Fuller was a fascinating auteur because his movies felt so archetypically American. I think that’s probably because work that doesn’t make sense on its own terms is more purely the sum of its received terms; an artist who is only a muddle-headed product of the prevailing culture feels like the distilled essence of that culture. Bad jazz often sounds more like the concept of “jazz” than good jazz, because good jazz always sounds specific; mediocrity offers fewer distractions. I recognize that this movie, in its primitivism, does offer that kind of raw cultural transparency. But I feel like it’s important not to confuse a cipher with a visionary. Samuel Fuller may have made confused movies, but unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to have been the least bit nuts.

That’s all my justification for why I don’t think this is a work of lasting value. But as something to watch once, was it divertingly unpredictable? Absolutely. And in the moments when I was caught off guard by aesthetic whiplash, I did have glimpses of the “it’s kind of amazing!” experience. Then they would fade, as soon as I steadied my head and figured out what sort of garden-variety foolishness I was really dealing with.

I guess you wanna know what the movie is about. Ugh, fine. It’s about a hardened prostitute who, after looking in a mirror and touching her face, decides to go straight and become a nurse in a small town, at a hospital for handicapped children. She fights prejudice and the forces of immorality, and finally finds love with the richest, biggest-hearted, weirdest-looking man in town… but then (spoiler? alert?) walks in on him molesting a child, and, while in shock, kills him with a single whack of a telephone receiver. The police don’t believe her when she explains that he was a child molester, because she was a prostitute, but then the child in question is finally located and cheerfully says oh yes, yes he was. Thus exonerating her in the eyes of the town.

So you see it’s a combination of pulp morality, like an afterschool special, and pulp sordidness, like a paperback with a painting of a woman in a slip and the shadow of a gun on the cover. There are other elements in the mix too — including pulp “class,” in the form of gratuitous references to Beethoven and Goethe and a faraway-look talk about the wonders of Venice — but they all have in common that they would have been second nature to an enthusiastic, unselfconscious middlebrow hack circa 1964. The visual style follows directly.

As is typical of pulp, the title is mostly a lurid non-sequitur — but the film does eventually attempt a sort of explanation. Just after our heroine has fallen into her first kiss with the creepy man of her dreams, she briefly pushes him away with a troubled look in her eye, as though sorting something out for herself… before smiling again and letting passion take them where it will, pan to her curling toes. In watching the scene I assumed that she had to realign herself inwardly to actually enjoy a man’s touch for the first time in many many years — she had to think first and melt her inner ice. But no, that wasn’t what was going on, and I guess I should have known better, because that would have been too psychologically interesting for this movie. After the man turns out to be a child molester and she kills him, she explains to the police:

Once before a man’s kiss tasted like that. He was put away in a psycho ward. I got the same taste the first time Grant kissed me. It was a … what we call a naked kiss. It was the sign of a pervert.

If that kind of dialogue gets you going, this movie has what you’re looking for. But I think for most people, watching the trailer is probably a better choice than watching the movie. It’ll get you there and back in 2 minutes.

Incidentally, our next selection is Samuel Fuller’s previous movie, Shock Corridor (seen all too obviously on a marquee in The Naked Kiss), which I think might be about that very psycho ward she mentioned.

It’s hard to judge the acting as such, but Constance Towers certainly acquits herself well enough, and given the broad range of nonsense that is asked of her, that’s a real achievement. Look, she’s still going strong!

I didn’t know about Samuel Fuller before this. Having read up on him, it’s still hard for me to tell just how obscure he and his movies are. A problem with the internet is that if you look anything up, you’ll find out plenty about it, be it Shakespeare, Marlowe, or Dufelmeier. Sometimes all you really want to know is whether it’s worth knowing. The internet can’t help with that.

Music is by Paul Dunlap, who just died a few months ago. A prolific composer of scores for undistinguished movies. Here as your compilation track 18 is the rather dull main title. This is that soupy post-war branch of The Hollywood Style that I find very difficult to process with my analytical mind. How many times would you have to listen to this to be able to hum the melody? How many times would you have to listen to this to be able to recognize that it has a “melody”? Or a “rhythm”? For me, in this style, somehow all the basic concepts of music get lost in the mental wash. Without pressing down hard on my attention, I feel like I am failing the musical equivalent of a colorblindness test. All I can hear is what I was meant to hear: drama, drama, drama, drama, drama, drama, drama, drama!

Hm. I just listened again now and this time it seemed pretty straightforward. The mind can be a funny thing.

I was actually torn in choosing this as the music selection, because by far the most memorable and prominent musical cue is not this bland title theme but an icky, painfully sentimental 4-minute song sequence in the middle, sung by a group of kids on crutches who are all wearing pirate hats. I couldn’t bring myself to make it the selection because it’s just too long and unpleasant to listen to, but part of me feels like choosing anything else is a lie: that is the tune from The Naked Kiss if anything is.

So I am relieved now to have learned that the song in question is not original to this movie — it’s “Little Child” by Wayne Shanklin, 1953. So it obviously wouldn’t have been right to choose it over something from the original score. That’s another rationalization, anyway. The bottom line is, I didn’t want to hear those kids singing ever again.

July 24, 2010

17. Salò, o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975)

written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini
screenplay collaboration by Sergio Citti
based on the novel Les 120 journées de Sodome by Donatien Alphonse François, marquis de Sade (1785) [uncredited]

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Criterion #17.

I did not watch it. I will not be watching it.

That doesn’t mean I can’t engage with it and respond to it. Herewith, some words on why I will not watch Salò.

First a quick explanation of what the deal is with this movie, offered as a public service so that you don’t have to go investigating.

It is an adaptation of the “most notorious” work of the Marquis de Sade. I am no expert on the subject but my personal impression is that the Marquis de Sade was a more or less insane person whose circumstances (being born an aristocrat and living in revolutionary times) happened to allow his obsessive writings to be published, and whose obsession (taboo behavior, mostly a conflation of sex and torture) happened to provide convenient fodder for later philosophers, who found that “taking Sade seriously” was an expediently provocative stance. He’s now a household name because his psychosis and literary bent made him a useful point of reference to sane people, but that doesn’t mean his output is anything other than raving insanity.

His 120 Days of Sodom is the epitome of the “insane work” — it is basically a long list, rigorously organized and out of all proportion to any possible reader’s interest or attention, of every torturous depravity Monsieur de Sade could think of, in ascending order, up to (and well beyond) murder. The “story” is: four incredibly powerful and wealthy evil men organize a huge orgy of perversion in a castle, and this is how it goes… Sade’s writing principle seems to have been “think of the worst possible thing you can think of. Now top it.” When I described it to Adam, he said, “so it’s like The Aristocrats,” and that’s exactly right, down to the specifics. Everything The Aristocrats do in passing, Sade catalogues in ten different combinations. For him, it is important to distinguish between the case where the mother is raped while pooping on the dead body of the daughter, and the other way around. Or whatever.

As with The Aristocrats, these “flights” of “fancy” are not actually meaningful as anything other than an indulgence of the inward experience of the broken taboo. Which obviously can have a strong grip on people. (I am reminded of Maria Bamford’s bit about “unwanted thoughts” wherein she “kills her family and chops them into bits and then has sex with the bits and then eats the bits.”) But these are not symbols of other things and they are not artistic creations. They are just one madman’s compulsive dips into his inner vault of “complete awfulness.”

Here is my anecdote about The 120 Days of Sodom, and god help me that I even have one. One summer during college I stayed at school to do theater, for which on-campus housing was provided, all of us in the same little building. The atmosphere there was, as you might imagine, even more goofy and carefree than the ordinary dorm environment, which is saying something. One day a bunch of us were sitting in the common area and being exuberant, and someone noticed that an old library volume of the “works of Sade” was sitting out on one of the tables — how collegiate is that? — and picked it up and started looking for dirty passages to read aloud. Even in those pre-Wikipedian days, I somehow had heard that 120 Days of Sodom was supposed to be the dirtiest, most outrageous one, so I flipped through to find it for him. The guy took it out of my hands and read us a couple of Aristocrats-worthy scenarios, involving people being farted on while being poked with hot irons or something, and we laughed at the ridiculousness of it. Then he flipped forward a few pages… and suddenly sort of went quiet, and then put it down and said, “I’m not reading this anymore. That stuff’s not funny.” And that was the end of that.

Of course later I had to pick it up and see what he had just read! And yes, it wasn’t funny. The point is this: if you really and truly want to think of the worst thing you can think of, you will think of things too awful even for The Aristocrats, too awful even for laughing at their own overcooked absurdity. Too awful for you, but not for an actual torturer, and not for the actual Marquis de Sade.

So that brings us to this movie. Pasolini took Sade’s text, set the action in 1945 in the waning days of the Italian Fascist state (headquartered in the town of Salò), reduced the 120 days to about three, and then, well, filmed it, and apparently filmed it pretty well. The transposition to the fascist context and to the relative realism of film is intended to give the proceedings political and philosophical resonance. I imagine that it probably does.

The resulting film, as has been widely reported, is extremely extremely extremely unpleasant. I have read quite a few reviews and responses to this film, and not one of them fails to warn the prospective viewer that the film is perhaps the most disturbing ever made, is likely to induce actual vomiting, should absolutely not be viewed if the viewer is at all squeamish. In short, that the film is not just about horrors but that to watch it is itself a horror, a genuinely traumatic experience that will never be forgotten, and one that you may well regret.

Noted! Many people apparently find it difficult to actually take such advice. Not I. I believe that this advice has been offered with the sincere intent to help others, and I choose to benefit by it. I’m a person who frequently can’t fall asleep at night because I’m unable to prevent my mind from obsessively replaying mildly frightening imagery, over and over, until I am completely consumed by senseless terror. So I really can’t afford to let in the most poisonous imagery of all time.

Furthermore, though, even if I could trust my stomach and my mind to handle it, I have an ideological objection, one that goes to the heart of what movies are worth. I believe that this film was made in good faith; which is to say, not in contempt of its audience. Nor as a cheap exploitation wrapped in ideological hoo-hah. I think Pasolini meant what he said about it, and that his tongue was not particularly in cheek when he included a highbrow philosophical “recommended reading” list in the opening credits. I believe while he no doubt enjoyed being provocative, the impetus to make the film really did stem from a genuine horror at man’s inhumanity to man/fascism/political power/consumer culture/whatever — i.e. real social-philosophical issues. But there is no getting around the fact that the film is an expression of cold rage, and in my experience, rage is an illegitimate subject for expression. It devours communication and renders itself worthless.

When I was growing up, my father would sometimes become infuriated by something on the TV news — who knows what — and would say something along the lines of “people like that should be shot!” to which my mother would then object for the kids’ sake, i.e., “That’s a terrible thing to say. Nobody should be shot,” and my father would then generally agree, for the kids’ sake, “you’re right, I shouldn’t say that. Of course nobody should be shot” — unless he was really too angry to acknowledge it, in which case we’d have to take the retraction as implied. (Don’t worry, dad — and mom — we did.) The important thing is that my mother was right: since he obviously didn’t think anybody should really be shot, my father’s outbursts were utterly worthless as communication. They were symptoms of his anger that thus revealed his emotion to us, but they expressed nothing in themselves. They would have been better unsaid.

But I know the impulse. When I get really, really furious at someone, I have the reflexive desire to confront him, and if possible shock him, with the severity of my emotion — to force him to see what he has engendered through his unkindness. And then, after I have realized with acute frustration that in most cases, a truly unsympathetic person will be able to shrug off the fact of my pain, I want him to be aware of an equivalent pain that cannot be shrugged off. When some asshole would be cruel to me for no reason in middle school, my mind would go wildly searching for a way to get through to him how wrong that was, and upon reaching the impasse that it was impossible to get it through to him, I would become agitated with the sense that I was confronting a paradox, a thing that should not be.

Pain thinks it must be transferable, translatable — because otherwise how will I ever be rid of it? This is why aggrieved people want murderers to go to the electric chair, right? “You apparently can’t experience how awful the thing you did was for me, but I’ll bet no matter how callous you are, you think being zapped to death with electric current is just as awful for you, so that’s how we’re going to make ourselves known.”

So Sean Hannity, for whatever twisted reason, only smiles smarmily when he finds out how angry and upset he made me. Positively inhuman, right? But being shot – ha-HA, Mr. Hannity, I’ve got your number now!

The problem is, what do we do in our fantasy when it turns out that, say, “the abuse of power” doesn’t even experience pain upon being shot? What??? But I hate it so!!! Or that, say, “human cruelty” will keep on chattering away cheerily even after being forced to eat shit and then raped? ARE YOU KIDDING ME???? Goddammit, there must be a reciprocal to my rage.

But just as you cannot divide by zero, there is no amount of atrocity you can put in a movie that will really sock it to the concept of atrocity. No matter how merciless a death my father dared imagined for the hateful people on TV, the only people hearing him were his own children. No matter how much shit-eating Pasolini puts in his movie, the only people seeing it are his audience, and once again, the real villain sneaks away smirking like Hannity. GODDAMMIT! Meanwhile we and the Criterion Collection end up sitting here having a really thoughtful conversation about art, which is ultimately beside the point.

I am skeptical of any work of art where the motivating sentiment seems to be the same as Charlton Heston shouting at the Statue of Liberty: “You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!” Can you imagine how much eye-gouging and scalping and so forth he would have to put in his Salò to express that level of outrage? Too bad it’ll still only be apes seeing it.

It would be another thing if Salò were meant as a realist kick-in-the-imagination to pampered audiences. “Take a good look, pansies, because this is what goes on behind locked doors in torture chambers around the world.” Yes, that would be the “contempt of audience” form of bad faith I mentioned earlier, but it would at least serve a quasi-documentary sort of purpose — a call to action. But, though surely just about every horrible thing imaginable and more has actually happened to some poor soul somewhere (well, except for the kind of stuff that happens in the Saw movies), the reenacted atrocities in Salò are totally literary, a dreamlike pageant of ritual awfulness of no documentary value. For all the essays I’ve read about it, I haven’t seen a one that described it as a call to action. What action?

I don’t need a kick-in-the-imagination — please, please trust me on this one, art world! — but what I really don’t need is a manifestation of evil made vile so as to spite evil itself. What?

Pasolini apparently said his intent was to make an “indigestible” film. But such a film, like unwearable clothes or a pitcher with holes in it, is not a film per se but rather a piece of conceptual art, best displayed under glass at a museum, in a canister. By viewing it we err.

And if Pasolini would agree with me… well then, I pass the test! Hooray, I nailed it!

Funny Games is even more misbegotten and I promise never to watch that either. I resent having been made to even see the trailer while out in the world, innocently going to see a real movie. At least Salò is well tucked away in its lovely packaging, where only the willing will see it or even need to think about it.

The Criterion edition seems to be extremely well curated, with tons of bonus material that people say is fascinating. I seriously considered getting the second disc and just watching that, but then I thought better of it. All I ended up doing was watching the first 10 minutes or so on youtube, the pre-atrocity part where the victims are rounded up, about which one paragraph:

An obscure movie, a movie that you’ve only heard of around the fringes of things — something like this — part of the horror is always that when you see it, it’s not just some vague thing that you read about in some footnote somewhere, but is fully existent, and every moment recorded on it represents a moment that really occurred somewhere in space and time. Digging into the bottom of the basket of movies is like digging into the bottom of the basket of moments, and I get a sort of vertigo about the infinite nooks and crannies of time — this movie didn’t originate in obscurity, it originated in reality. This is the essence of the horror of the “snuff film” type — somewhere, at some point in time, this was, as much as I am now. Even just having watched the first few innocent minutes of this movie… it’s shocking how utterly existent it is. The sky in it is blue, the flesh is real, the images hiss with prosaic actuality. All that stuff I read about is going to happen in this space? Okay, I don’t need to see any more.

I don’t think I need to write any more either. I feel that I have honorably discharged my duty toward this Criterion Collection title without actually touching the disc.

So, without further ado: the track for your album. Main titles.

This deserves a little comment. I gather that nearly all of the music in Salò is borrowed and unattributed, but the esteemed Ennio Morricone is credited as music supervisor. This track seems to be his own very slight variant (to evade copyright?) on the standard These Foolish Things. Though some writers have investigated the thematic relation between the lyrics and the film, I think mostly this is just a straight romantic song and the point is that it’s a straight romantic song. Get it? Just like “We’ll Meet Again” at the end of Dr. Strangelove, this sardonically pleasant bourgeois smoothness has been put here out of pure, giddy fury.

It’s pretty darn catchy!

July 21, 2010

16. 宮本武蔵 完結篇 決闘巌流島 (1956)

directed by Hiroshi Inagaki
screenplay by Tokuhei Wakao and Hiroshi Inagaki
based on Hideji Hojo’s adaptation of the novel by Eiji Yoshikawa (1935–9)

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Criterion #16. This title’s so huge it takes up two cards — think of that!

I know, I know, we all love this translation busywork. It must be done — trust me — but I’m going to keep it as brief as I can.

宮本武蔵完結編 決闘巌流島, pasted from Wikipedia, is identical to the title seen onscreen in the film, except for the seventh character (last character on the first screenshot above). I can find some Japanese sites that corroborate the character 篇 in place of 編, but no clear explanation of the distinction; as with last time, the dictionaries and translation sites buy the Wikipedia version and are uncertain about the film version, so maybe it’s archaic, or regional.

宮本武蔵 = “Musashi Miyamoto”
完結編 (完結篇?) = “kanketsuhen,” concluding episode or part
決闘 = “kettō,” duel (now being spelled the standard way)
巌流島 = “Ganryūjima” a real island

So: Musashi Miyamoto kanketsuhen: kettō Ganryūjima, or “Musashi Miyamoto concluded: Duel at Ganryujima.” Criterion has Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island. Fine!

Final analysis roundup: the first one stands up the best on its own, but if one is going to watch the whole series, this third one is the most compelling and interesting. The second one falls victim to the standard “middle chapter” problem — since it contains neither setup nor payoff of the main storyline, it has to depend on a secondary subplot for its sense of form, and so it feels accordingly inconsequential.

Of course, even that’s not a great excuse, because the “main storyline” of this series isn’t some kind of elegant, rigorously constructed arc — it’s more of a meandering episodic thing, where the characters crop up and down and meet and separate over many years. Hence the “Japan’s Gone with the Wind” thing that Criterion pushed in their marketing. Yeah — Gone with the Wind has always felt a little arbitrary to me, too.

It may just be that I don’t have a very well developed taste for epic structure. I think it’s probably part of my audience-member DNA that I am personally very dependent on form, balance through time, symmetry, expectations, etc. I don’t really know what to make emotionally of experiences that spool out at indefinite length. My mild sense of lostness in movies like these is I think analogous to my sense of lostness listening to, say, Japanese traditional music. The form is too relaxed and open for me to care about where we’re going, so my only recourse is to care entirely about the present moment… but then the present moments in these movies are no more nuanced or rich than in any other movies. Likewise the present moments in traditional Asian musics. Where is my heart supposed to go? It just sort of lolls around inside of me, waiting for someone to speak up and point and say “look, a future approaches — let’s go try to meet it!” Either that or “look right here, look how true this is!” But neither of those happens.

I know they’re not going to happen, of course, because the real point of a movie like this is something else — it’s about feeling some kind of transport of epic-ness. I’m not unsusceptible to transports of epic-ness, even very old-fashioned ones — like I said, I was generically moved when he walked into the sunset at the end of the first one, and I was similarly moved by moments in this one — but I don’t seek them out, nor am I inclined to seize every slight opportunity to experience them. Fantastical, unreasonable emotions have to actually come and find me; if they just hover nearby as possibilities, I am skeptical of them. This is, I think, why opera has always been hard for me.

This third movie is particularly opera-like in that one can tell by the rhythm, by the music, by the swells of unearthly intensity, whenever the story is breathing its epic breaths — and if one chooses, one can be emotionally affected by the incredible poignancy that is being telegraphed, even as one doesn’t necessarily know why the circumstances entail such poignancy. I gather that such moments are actually the most treasured and most profound to opera-lovers — the unjustifiable emotions that billow eerily outward from flimsy, clichéd events. I guess I get the appeal, but only in proportion and only within a clear framework. Man does not live by Fancy Feast alone.

Wow, that’s pretty confused, but I’m leaving it.

This movie is also opera-like in its grand-scale contrivances and absurd crises. When one of the two desperate woman tosses the other an axe, seizes her own, and declares that they are going to fight to the death for Musashi’s love, that’s, uh, really something.

Anyway, I appreciated that this episode sort of addressed my thematic problems with the last one, even if some of its answers aren’t retroactive. Yes, it was wrong for Musashi to kill all those guys! and yes, above and beyond being the best of the best, there is real life to be lived. Musashi spends a good hour of this one being a farmer, working the land and whittling holy statues out of wood. He has attained enough samurai wisdom to realize that rather than kicking ass, maybe he should be tending his garden. In light of where we had come from, I appreciated that. Of course, it is all in the interest of building up to the superhero duel of a lifetime. But even at the climax, the moral turns out to be that to kill a great man in the name of being awesome is actually tragic, and Musashi (spoiler alert: he wins) ends the trilogy with tears in his eyes. Substantive, right? Well, not really, but an honorable gesture toward substance.

Once again, it was something to look at it. The fighting continued to seem very fake, but when huge, dangerous-looking, obviously real fires blaze right nearby, it more than compensates. And the final sunset-on-the-beach duel was lovely.

These movies are not superficial or kinetic enough to be watched as action, not perceptive or well-written enough to be watched as real human drama, not thoughtful enough to be watched as philosophic or symbolic, nor even clearly-drawn enough to be really savored as melodramatic soap. But what they are is a genial mishmash of bits of all those things, in an excellently nostalgia-colored package. They didn’t mean much to me but they cannot be borne any ill will. They were as sturdy and reassuring and unworthy of criticism as a speckled linoleum floor. I feel certain that they would have bored me plenty as a kid. To an adult, such a warm boredom can be its own reward.

Let me mention the occasional narrative subtitles that don’t correspond to anything, which have been present in all three. I read that in the original US release of the first episode, William Holden’s voice was added to help connect the dots for foolish westerners, but there is no such voice to be heard here, in any language. Are these subtitles replacements for unseen Japanese subtitles, or are they just bold editorial additions by the translators? I want to believe they’re the former; they feel like they fall in places where the movie has intentionally left space for them. In any case, they were helpful.

Trivia: this is the movie from whence the “he’s so amazing that he can catch flies with chopsticks” thing comes. The Karate Kid just up and lifted it.

Farewell, Ikuma Dan. I suspect we won’t be hearing from you again. I understand you were a very successful opera composer. And why not. My listeners at home will be relieved to learn that for the third go-round, he reworked the theme to reflect Musashi’s newfound maturity, and so this, your Criterion Collection track 16, is actually different music from the preceding two. Hooray! Main title.

Okay, now that we’re at the end I’ll offer you this: it turns out that you can watch all three of these movies online, at a site that seems to agree with me that they epitomize the “movie that happens to be on TV.” One, two, three. Knock yourself out.

July 17, 2010

15. 續 宮本武蔵 一乗寺の決斗 (1955)

directed by Hiroshi Inagaki
screenplay by Tokuhei Wakao and Hiroshi Inagaki
based on Hideji Hojo’s adaptation of the novel by Eiji Yoshikawa (1935–9)

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Criterion #15.

I can’t tell you how many emails I’ve received since my post about Musashi Miyamoto begging me please to review the sequel. Conveniently enough, said sequel is the very next release in The Criterion Collection, and I have just watched it, so I am well equipped to meet that request. Nonetheless, those eager correspondents, if any, are going to be disappointed, because I firmly maintain that I do not write “reviews” on this here site. Sorry kids, but like the song says, I can’t be your Owen Gleiberman. My self-assignment is simply to write “responses,” or more precisely, to give an entry the same title as whatever movie I have just seen, and then put something in the body. The rest, dear reader, is up to you.

Or is it?

In any case, luckily for y’all I have fairly conservative tastes as a blogeur and the chances are slim that I will go all avant-garde and not mention the movie once. Though I am gearing up to do an apologia about how I refuse to watch one of the movies. Aficionados of the list will know what I’m talking about.

OKAY, IT’S ICHIJOJI TIME!!!

Let me and google break “続宮本武蔵 一乗寺の決闘” down for you.
続 = “Zoku,” a prefix meaning “continuation” or “sequel.”
宮本武蔵 = “Miyamoto Musashi,” ah-DUH. See how it’s big and bold on the title card?
一乗寺 = “Ichijōji” (or Ichijō-ji”), the name of a real Buddhist temple
の = “no,” a basic particle that here is apparently a sort of possessive, like “of”
決闘 = “kettō,” meaning “duel” (made of characters meaning “decision” and “fight”)

(Oh, except wait, even though that’s how it’s spelled in absolutely every reference source online (though some of them omit the の), that’s not how it’s spelled on the title card. The last character is different, see? 斗, not 闘. This is a bit of a stumper for my online resources. Google translate is still willing to tell me that 決斗 means “duel,” but the transliteration site says that 決斗 is not “kettō” but “ketsu to,” and none of the dictionaries are having it. Also, I see that the preview for this movie actually has the character 閗 in that place, which if you look closely seems to be a sort of compromise.)

(Oh hey, and look at that, the first character is different too. 續 instead of 続. The sources tell me it’s just a lesser-used variant of the same. Apparently, in Japanese, the exact characters aren’t considered a essential part of titles. Or maybe something else is going on. I give up. In case you didn’t know, I DON’T SPEAK JAPANESE.)

So anyway, we (probably) have Zoku Miyamoto Musashi Ichijōji no kettō, which is something lke Musashi Miyamoto continued: Ichijōji Duel.” Criterion calls it Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple, which is fine, all things considered, though I still think they could have manned up and admitted that this trilogy is called Musashi Miyamoto and not Samurai. As mentioned last time. I’m gonna let that go, I swear.

So far, so good, my lucky readers!

If you are a lover of samurai films, you will know this film well as “the one where at the beginning he fights a guy with a chain and at the end he goes up against like 80 guys by himself.” The path between those two points is wobbly. Where the first film felt pleasantly simplistic, this one trips over its feet a little. Perhaps the problem is that the source material is overlong and overcomplicated and the task of adaptation has been occasionally fumbled.

Here is what it was like to watch this movie:

“Since when does that other woman also love Musashi desperately, and why? What is the significance of this fighting school, and why is he so dead-set on dueling the master? Is he really actually killing all these guys just to hone his skills? Is he still an outlaw? What is driving him personally? Are we supposed to see him as sensitive or insensitive? Are we supposed to feel sorry for the pathetic, cowardly former friend, or is he comic relief? Or is he actually supposed to be despicable? Does the priest want the woman to become a nun? Who was the Yoda-like guy at the beginning and why didn’t he ever reappear? Is that kid really Musashi’s apprentice or not? Why on earth does the woman rebuff Musashi when he finally tries to kiss her? What’s the deal with the mysterioso nemesis guy? Other than establishing himself for the audience so that he can duel Musashi in the next movie, what the hell is he doing? And don’t any of these samurai, like, own land or something? Didn’t being a samurai entail something beyond an endless Street Fighter II competition for fighting supremacy and soulful awesomeness?”

The answer to the last question is, “uh, I don’t think so, at least not in this movie.” Just now did some Wikipedia reading to understand what the deal is with samurai, and I see that, okay, for a time they really were sort of rogue would-be warlords who roamed around obsessing over honor and challenging each other to monster duels. Something just feels strangely untethered about that as a milieu. In westerns, there’s always something at stake — a town or a ranch or a woman or something — around which the duels crop up. The plot of Seven Samurai was about a town; that made sense to me. In detective noir there’s some client’s money that makes the thing go — the moral code, the betrayals etc. are the dust that gets stirred up by the plot. Musashi, by contrast, lives in a MacGuffinless universe. He is in it to win it and there is no ‘it’. He must fight and scowl and concentrate because that is his destiny, period.

Presumably there is some final epic duel — don’t quote me on this, but I think it just might be a Duel at Ganryu Island — beyond which lies the state of true mastery, which having been attained will allow Musashi to do something or other. But my guess is the movie will end at that point. If there is any doing in this universe, it is not our concern. These are movies about what a man will be, played out in as little context as possible. Historically accurate or not, that’s some pretty stylized subject matter, and I think your mileage will depend on how much that corresponds with your personal worldview. It’s not very close to mine. The moral question of how to be seems fairly obvious, to me, so I prefer movies that are about people figuring out what to do.

Based on youtube and amazon comments, the people who love these movies seem to be people who are moved by the idea of pursuing a moral code, and also people who are moved by heroes, heroes, heroes. Something about the appeal of the “hero” paradigm escapes me. I like a protagonist as much as the next guy, but who is a hero, really? He’s a protagonist praised for exactly what you don’t have in common with him. (Don’t Harry Potter fans realize that they’re all filthy muggles?) Musashi has an incredible talent for swordfighting. Okay, well, I totally can’t relate to that, so how about you tell me if he’s a sympathetic person. Oh, really, we’re done here?

Luckily for Musashi he’s played by Toshiro Mifune, who obviously has a solid, appealing screen presence (though it’s still an effort for me not to constantly be weighing him skeptically against the ridiculously immoderate praise heaped on him by that Seven Samurai commentary guy). Liking a character because he has a solid, appealing screen presence is much easier for me than liking him because he is a great fighter. He and the other actors fill out their tenuous characters with big, clean, obvious performances.

The photography is smart and often very attractive, with frequent and effective use of old-fashioned, well-choreographed camera movement — several lovely moments of lateral tracking through multilayered scenery. And the color, as mentioned last time, is a splendid period piece in itself. But this film seemed to me to be in significantly worse shape than the previous one — the colors are less intense and the image is generally muddier, with occasional ghosty edges. That means a lot when you’re watching for the colors above all else! Also, look how much less pretty the title screen was! Netflix told me I wouldn’t like this one quite as much as the previous, and as usual, it was right.

Still, a pleasant sort of movie to watch without interest. It seems to bring along with it the cozy fact that it is late at night, you are flipping channels, and this broad, earnest thing is just what happened to be on.

Here’s your Criterion Collection track 15: the main title. Same composer, same theme, same arrangement. Apart from the exciting trills at the beginning and end, this is almost exactly the opening cue from the previous movie, now unencumbered by sound effects so you can hear the whole thing. I know this will seem pretty redundant coming on the heels of the last track… but so does the movie so it’s only appropriate. And hey, it’s a better recording. In any case it’s our only real option.

P.S. My favorite subtitle:

July 13, 2010

14. 宮本武蔵 (1954)

directed by Hiroshi Inagaki
screenplay by Tokuhei Wakao and Hiroshi Inagaki
based on Hideji Hojo’s adaptation of the novel by Eiji Yoshikawa (1935–9)

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Criterion #14.

1. Title:
“宮本武蔵” = “Miyamoto Musashi,” the name of the hero (in standard last name, first name order). Musashi Miyamoto was a real person and is apparently fairly well-mythologized in Japanese culture (in part because of the book upon which these movies are based), so in Japan this title is probably as self-explanatory as, say, Robin Hood. Not so in the west, of course, so when the movie was released in the US (where it won the 1955 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film) it was called Samurai, which is a sensible retitling, at least for the time. The Musashi Miyamoto trilogy of which this is the first part was accordingly known in the US as the “Samurai” trilogy.

All well and good, but then Criterion goes and decides to release this movie under the needlessly roman-numerated and encolonated title Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto, which to my ear is all off-putting geeky pompousness. This overcomplicated form of the title is not only on the packaging (and the website), but actually appears as the subtitling for the lovely four-character title screen seen above, where it feels blatantly wrong and ungainly.

I am going to call this movie Musashi Miyamoto, the first film in a trilogy of the same name. Like Back to the Future, or Star Wars (at least before they retroactively loused that one up).

2. Digression:
Aren’t we all really glad that the Back to the Future sequels didn’t have subtitles? Don’t Back to the Future II: Biff’s Revenge and Back to the Future III: Doc Brown’s Return sound like really stupid, pointless movies? The answer is yes, which leads to another question — since colons and subtitles are such an obvious mistake, why do so many movies today have them?

2.1. Where does all the time go?:
Actual Wikipedia browsing transcript, departing immediately.
Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend->Mokele-mbembe->Carl Hagenbeck->Human zoo->Ota Benga->Human teeth sharpening->Dee Snider->Jesse Blaze Snider->”What am I doing?”

3. Expectations:
Were very low. Especially knowing that the genre’s most beloved masterpiece had made so weak an impression on me, I didn’t think this would be my cup of tea ceremony (that’s a ‘before and after’). And the prospect of three of these damn things meant I was anticipating true tedium.

4. So:
When it turned out to be perfectly watchable, that felt like a lovely gift. Expectations are everything in this game! If all I had known about Seven Samurai had been that it was an old Japanese period movie, I probably would have been absolutely delighted by how much fun it was. But having been told that it was the all-time greatest movie of all time, I was underwhelmed. Here, not having been told anything other than that I was going to see some technicolor samurai, I had room to find my own fun in it.

5. Me:
Ain’t that always the way, with me — when I’m alone with something, I easily find that I like it. When other people and their opinions are in play, I don’t usually get there. I guess I find people and their opinions exceedingly distracting. It’s the instinct against roaming too far from common consent — in the interest of being sociable, essentially — that tends to ruin things for me. So when there’s no common consent, I am extremely likely to have a satisfying time. Most experiences manage to be interesting when I’m free to simply have them. The world is, after all, pretty interesting.

5.1 Others like me:
I know I’m not the only one like this — this is the same principle that drives lots of people to be obnoxiously passionate about the things they’ve found off the beaten track. In fact I imagine it’s the reason that we even have an expression for the concept of “off the beaten track.” What reason could there ever be for devaluing a thing just because it’s popular? People tend to imply that it’s an attitude born of prideful ego — “I’m better than most people so I should make clear that I like different things from most people” — but I suspect that more often it’s a feeling that arises because the social obligations implicit in the beaten track are numbing. Out in the wilderness you’re free to be yourself.

5.2 Let’s not forget though:
The movie that sparked this thought is after all in the extremely well-known Criterion Collection. I’m not very far afield here. Which just goes to show how little you have to wander off on your own before things feel entirely different.

5.3 And let’s be clear:
The point here is not that it’s all that great. The point is that I had a good time because I was alone. None of you have seen this, have you? None of you that I know, anyway.

6. Correction:
This movie is not in Technicolor — it is in Eastmancolor, which you know as the cheaper, fade-ier, 50s-ier palette that followed Technicolor. I don’t know what kind of color adjustment may have been done for this transfer — the night scenes seem awfully dark — but the tints on this old film don’t feel the least bit faded. The color is extremely vivid; green forests, blue skies, and red kimonos all flame like a retouched photograph on a postcard. It all seems to lean a little yellowish. Entering that color space is a good 80% of the experience, and I was able to relish that experience. That 50s color world evokes a satisfying balance of stodginess and innocence that I find endearing and grandfatherly. It feels muscular but only in the most impotent, comical, faraway way.

7. It’s like:
It’s like watching Davy Crockett.

8. The disc:
Has nothing on it. I mean, it has subtitles, and it has the original trailer. That’s it.

9. Music:
There’s a full-Hollywood-treatment score by Ikuma Dan. It it simple and obvious and old-fashioned, just like the movie. I said about the Seven Samurai score that it was a sort of Japan-ified imitation of American standard practice; this one was hardly distinguishable from American standard practice, to my ears. In great part neither was the movie. This movie pretty much might as well be the cowboy movie that it might as well have been. This music seems never to have been released as a soundtrack; not recently anyway.

My idea with these ripped tracks is that in every movie, there’s always at least one chunk of music that’s meant to function on its own terms and have an equal share of the audience’s attention as the picture, if not more. Most often it occurs during the titles at the beginning or end (whichever is longer), though sometimes it’s elsewhere. This movie is no exception, but what’s unfortunate here is that there are no whole pieces that stand on their own — the opening title cue, our obvious choice, runs seamlessly into the first scene, which is full of noise. So in lieu of subjecting you to an awkward fade out, I have done a quick cut to the music from the very very end of the movie, which is tacked on here to provide a suitable conclusion. Luckily the movie ends with the same theme played in the same key — classical training at work, at its most reflexive!

Main Titles + Finale

The cellos are obligated to remind us about the whole Japan thing, but the theme is pure cowboy gold. Not a bad theme, as cowboy gold goes. You can rest assured that yes, he is indeed walking epically into an Eastmancolor sunset during that last bit. And I’m only slightly embarrassed to admit that I found those last moments stirring, in an entirely meaningless way.

This sounds to me like the music of a movie being watched on TV in the background of another movie. The whole movie is like a movie being watched on TV in another movie. It is, in every frame, the epitome of “some old samurai movie.”

10. Final thoughts:
Well, I have things to say about characterization and the genre and stuff, but I have two more shots at this so I feel certain that this is plenty for now.

11. P.S.
(He’s a wild young man who wants glory, he goes to battle, he becomes an outlaw, a priest sees his potential and gets him to start learning discipline, he heads off into the sunset to become a true samurai; along the way he fights some bad guys and meets some ladies.)

July 2, 2010

13. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

directed by Jonathan Demme
screenplay by Ted Tally
based on the novel by Thomas Harris (1988)

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Criterion Collection #13.

This is a much-overrated movie. It has touches of class that I think may have confused some people who don’t understand that one swallow does not a summer make, certainly not when an evil psychiatrist cannibal is helping to track a corpse-skinning pervert. What we have here is none other than an unreformed 80s-style thriller, the kind that ought to leave you feeling a little dirty. It is irredeemably grounded in the puerile pet fantasies of the genre, fixated on the baroque pathologies of outlandish serial killers just as shamelessly as superhero comics are fixated on skintight muscle suits. This is a movie where it turns out that coincidentally, Hannibal Lecter was once Buffalo Bill’s psychiatrist, and nobody thinks even to comment on the coincidence — because it’s a serial killer’s world; they probably run into each other all the time at serial killer bars. Just like nobody needs to comment on how wildly unlikely it is that Gotham City happens be home to a superhero and to any number of supervillains. A fantasy world populates itself according to its own fixations and hangups. Having seen this movie, a cruel, brilliant psychoanalyst like Hannibal Lecter could probably say a choice word or two about Thomas Harris. Not to mention the reading public.

And the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

In the interest of brotherly love, I should grant that there may be nothing wrong with the hangups to which this movie caters — they’re just not mine. That would be the high road, anyway… but my heart, Clarice, but my heart! My heart tells me this is extremely suspect stuff. I think for the character of Hannibal Lecter to resonate, you have to be the type of person who thinks the whole notion of “psychology” is intrinsically gothic and finds violent cannibalism perversely fascinating. I’m proud to say that’s just not me. I got no love for zombies, neither. However, inadvertent “gotcha” cannibalism of the albatross soup and Sweeney Todd variety is another story; that I can get behind. I think maybe it’s because the emphasis there is on inflicting self-disgust on another person, rather than the physical act of eating flesh. The latter just isn’t a very rich subject for me. I understand that there are people for whom it is, and I reserve the right to be a little suspicious of them.

Ditto cutting off people’s skin — emphatic ditto! There has to be a secret savor in a horror for it to be satisfying, beyond just being pushed toward something to which you are averse. You need to feel some kind of pull, as well. For me, too much of the stuff in this movie had no secret savor. Sometimes an “ick” is just an “ick.” Again, to each his own. Also again, if that’s your own, I am uncomfortable with you.

I have another, related gripe: the movie can’t decide whether or not it’s supposed to be fun. Hitchcockian naughtiness (“I’m having an old friend for dinner”) and Eszterhasian grandstanding “hardcore” crudeness (“I can smell your cunt!”) are incompatible paradigms. If you’re going to relish mincing words, you can’t also relish not mincing words. The whole idea of “not mincing words” is rejecting mince! This movie tries to have its mince and disdain it too.

Case in point: When Clarice is about to meet Lecter for the first time, the head of the institute warns her to keep her distance by saying that he went to the infirmary once and “when the nurse leaned over him, he did this to her” — and then pulls out a photo that we don’t see but Clarice does, and suddenly they are bathed in red light. So far so good, and Hitch would approve. But then he keeps talking. “The doctors managed to reset her jaw more or less. Saved one of her eyes. His pulse never got above 85 — even when he ate her tongue.” Well, now that’s pretty on-the-nose disgusting, isn’t it? Why don’t you just show us the damn picture, while you’re at it.

Speaking of which: consider the autopsy scene. After the body bag is opened, we only see their uneasy reactions. The corpse is just an unfocused foreground blur at the very bottom of the shot as we look up at Clarice examining it — but of course our imaginations are drawn directly to the gore that we can’t see. So far it’s reminiscent of the parallel autopsy scene in Jaws, where we are meant to be uncomfortably aware of what the characters are looking at, just out of our field of view. After much teasing, that scene climaxes when a gnawed forearm is lifted into frame for just a second — which after that buildup, feels like a considerable thing to bear. That one second is the whole payoff, and it’s the correct payoff, because Jaws is a mince relish movie, unequivocally and sure-footedly so.

Now back to the Silence of the Lambs autopsy. At first, as I said, we’re spared the gore and teased with a low angle. But as the scene goes on, we start to see parts of the body more clearly and directly; and then quite casually, without any fanfare, we’re shown it at full length on the table, bloated and rotting and repulsive. Oops! Guess this wasn’t “teasing and fun” like Jaws after all! I guess it’s more “unflinching and clinical” (= “lurid and sleazy” done up in its Sunday best). But if so, why does the scene start with the teaser low angle? It just feels like borrowed business, misunderstood.

The progression from averted to direct gaze does make a certain kind of abstract sense from a character-development perspective: as Clarice gains her nerve and begins to master her professional role, what began as too horrible to contemplate becomes matter-of-fact. But if that’s the concept, it’s a dumb concept, because that’s exactly the opposite of the effect it achieves for the audience. Clarice gradually comes to terms with the corpse because she does see it immediately. But we don’t see it, so that’s a journey we can’t go on with her. We spend that time having our own experience of ascending discomfort, as we slowly lose faith that the film has any actual interest in playful teasing, any actual intention of sparing us the grossness.

The scariest movies, for me, are the ones that I don’t trust. In a well-mannered movie — like, say, the Bourne movie we just watched on TV the other day — if a razor blade gets pulled out in the middle of a fistfight, I might worry for the character but I don’t really have to worry that the movie’s gonna go all chien Andalou on me, because good manners dictate that one imply such things obliquely (except for occasionally at climaxes). But a movie that has proven that it has no breeding, and may even have a few screws loose, is a genuinely dangerous movie, because anything could happen. In the final analysis, apart from a few minor faux-pas, The Silence of the Lambs turns out to be reasonably well-behaved, but its manners are just too erratic for comfort. I wouldn’t want it to be my date to anyplace nice. Like for example the Oscars!

The 80s were a particularly ill-bred time.

Jodie Foster’s commentary on the DVD is almost entirely Joseph Campbell-type stuff about her character’s mythic journey. Her conviction is that the movie does a great cultural service by presenting a true female hero. It’s easy to smirk at this sort of talk — especially since, while hearing it, you’re watching The Silence of the Lambs — but I think the point is basically sympathetic. If you’re in the movie business and you want to nudge the cultural norms, inserting some unremarkable but non-trivial feminism into the DNA of a pop-cinema genre is probably one of the best ways to do it. Maybe only effective if that movie becomes completely iconic, but luckily enough, this one did.

So like I said, I think the movie throws up a sort of quality smokescreen by having a few unexpected touches of taste and intelligence. What are those touches? For one, a graceful camera style that is more curious than salacious, a willingness to glance around and take things in. Like the occasional color cutaway to, say, a lawn whirligig shaped like a canoeing Indian, which is part of a light sprinkling of “American history” imagery that could easily provide a freshman with material for a serviceable two-page paper. Another interesting touch is the distinctive use of tight close-ups on characters speaking directly into the camera. I guess I’m complimenting the cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, here.

And, of course, the strongest point, and the real reason this movie took off, is the odd simplicity of all the “Yes, Clarissssse!” scenes. Anthony Hopkins says on the commentary that his very first scene was what appealed to him about the part, and that he built the whole performance outward from the character’s show of power in the speech where he calls her out as white trash and cuts her down. With this in mind, it’s striking how very theatrical in conception — and performance — those scenes are. The two characters are stationary and engaged in an impossibly heightened exchange; that’s like every play I’ve ever seen. I think a big reason that the scene has lodged itself so firmly in the cultural memory and has provoked so much loving parody is that it is so durably the stuff of the stage. It feels iconic because it feels ancestral — a holdover from the great mother art out of which the cinema was born. I think deep in our guts we all feel that the things people say to each other while standing still are the most human and lasting part of film. The camera moving around, lights flashing, color and sound and so forth — that’s all more artificial and thus more suspect — and thus, we feel, less substantive — than sheer old-fashioned thespianism. This inner bias doesn’t rise to the surface all that often, but it definitely affects the sweepstakes of icon-formation. The “greatest moments” in movie history, according to common consensus, are generally moments when two people are standing near each other and one of them says something to the other one, like, “Frankly, kid, I coulda been an offer that Kansas is made of.” (“And don’t call me Frankly!”). Generally, it seems like most of the stuff that gets the Oscar ceremonies all misty about the magic of cinema is the stuff that could have been done on stage.

Look, here they are in a photo shoot just last year, in which all extraneous elements have been removed. Doesn’t this look like it might be a good play — maybe even a better play than it was a movie? Certainly Clarice’s goofy lamb monologue would be easier to accept. I think it would work well in a black box theater where the audience sat real close. They’d cut most of the non-Lecter scenes and just have them described, or suggested abstractly with artsy projections. The play would be called Ovis and take itself super-seriously. Starring Tony-award-winners Denis O’Hare and Scarlett Johansson.

Dear world, if this all comes to pass I would like a “special thanks to” credit in the program.

The Criterion edition is out of print, so no Netflix, but it’s not rare enough that anyone has felt the need to put it online. So… I had to buy it. For 8 bucks I have no regrets. It’s clearly the product of the early years of DVD, having no subtitles, and with several of the bonus features consisting of onscreen text — FBI perspectives on various serial killer cases; much of it needlessly horrific stuff, frankly, though I did find it interesting to read about how profiling works in the real world.

The only really interesting “deleted scene” is a neat solo video performance by Jim Roche as a televangelist, a clip of which is briefly seen but not heard on a TV set in the film. The commentary track (unavailable on any other edition) was pleasant enough listening though not particularly deep. Jonathan Demme seems pretty down-to-earth and unpretentious. I was struck by the fact that absolutely nothing fond is said at any point about Ted Levine. Demme doesn’t mention him at the end when he lists all the great people he had the pleasure of working with. But his tiny little performance is what stuck with me most after my first viewing years ago, and I know I’m not alone in that. I still think the best scene in the movie is when she finally shows up at Bill’s house and they have a few creepy moments together in his kitchen before she pulls her gun out.

Composer Howard Shore is pretty good about dramaturgy, but as usual he seems to be composing with a jumbo quick-dry magic marker. I’ll never forgive him for those Lord of the Rings scores with their relentless lack of nuance. Here the lack of nuance is more forgivable, though part of me still feels like the ratio of notes to instruments playing could stand to be a good bit higher. Yes, a soundtrack was released.

The main title is full of sound effects, so your Criterion compilation track 13 is the End Titles. Awfully bare stuff, no? But it does what it needs to do, as long as you’re not paying much attention.

This took much longer to write than it did to watch. I’d rather it not be that way, if I can help it.

By the way, I happened to see Demme’s utterly different Rachel Getting Married right before watching this. It was much better.

June 24, 2010

12. This is Spinal Tap (1985)

directed by Rob Reiner
written by Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, and Rob Reiner

[though, as Rob Reiner himself says at the beginning of his commentary track: “Really in all fairness it should be ‘directed by’ the four of us. … It says ‘written by’ the four of us, but the writing credit should read ‘everybody who’s in the film,’ because they all made up their parts.” Later someone says that they wanted to run that credit, but the Writer’s Guild nixed it.]

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Criterion Collection #12. Yeah, that’s right — remember when I was watching these in order, like, 18 months ago? You don’t? Well, the important thing is that I remember.

This is Spinal Tap is clearly better and more satisfying than any of Christopher Guest’s later directorial efforts in the same vein. While watching this time — I have seen it many times — I figured I’d try to identify why that is. What has it got that they ain’t got?

The answer I came up with: this movie is better — both funnier and a more admirable piece of filmmaking — because it takes seriously the premise that it is a documentary, and those later movies don’t. The existence of the film is itself legitimately part of the comic conceit here. The presence of Marty DiBergi may not seem all that significant, but it’s actually crucial, because even when he is not onscreen, we can still attribute the film’s perspective to him, to a character. When you watch a real documentary you can always sense the agenda, or at least the personality and philosophy, of the filmmaker. In Christopher Guest’s later movies, he tries as much as possible to eliminate this element, I imagine because he’s much more interested in actors than in films. But when an ostensible documentary has no authorial point of view, it becomes much harder to be invested in the nuanced specificity of the moments, which is where so much of the humor is meant to lie, because we can’t really believe in the space behind the camera. In Spinal Tap the comedy feels genuinely three-dimensional, extending behind us, around us, and into every aspect of what’s going on.

In fact, DiBergi and his camera might constitute the best straight man ever, because unlike most straight men he has a clear and pathetic motivation to take all the nonsense dead seriously – namely, his desperate, film-school-schlubby need to scrounge together a movie he can sell. We know that he is sweating about this project and thus is willing to work with absolutely any material he can get. He can’t afford to find any of it absurd.

That the title is the super-lame, old-fashioned, self-serious “This Is Spinal Tap” is itself comic, because we know it’s the title chosen by the kind of guy who wears a “USS Coral Sea” cap everywhere. The title card, see above, continues the joke. I don’t think there’s every been any other “mockumentary” that’s half so thoroughly realized as an artifact in itself.

Closely related is the vital contribution of cameraman Peter Smokler (seen here with the concert lighting designer, whose snapshot this is), who gives a pitch-perfect offscreen “performance” as DiBergi’s cameraman. He manages to make us believe that the guy holding the camera is really thinking on the fly and that what we are seeing is simply the result of someone scrappily trying to make the most of every situation as it unfolds. In great part he is, in fact, doing exactly that, but he never tips his hand enough to reveal that he’s really going for comic beats. He seems always only to be going for the moment, whatever it happens to be. It’s real documentary camerawork, as opposed to the tepid caricature of documentary camerawork used by later imitators. In the commentaries, everyone eventually notes in passing that Smokler had good instincts. Which is true but it seems to me like insufficient acknowledgement of the subtle trick he’s constantly pulling off. The camera is what really makes this movie feel like something special, like a place worth visiting.

I originally tried to bring up specific counterexamples from Waiting for Guffman while making the above points, but it turned out to be hard to write it that way, because what at first seems to be a matter of degree is actually a difference in kind. In the wake of This is Spinal Tap, a whole new genre has come into existence that actually doesn’t make any sense on its own terms, and Christopher Guest’s later movies are of this new type. To enumerate the thousands of ways that, say, The Office isn’t at all convincing as a documentary is to miss the boat utterly, as any fan of The Office would exasperatedly tell you. And yet at the same time, the premise that it “is” a “documentary” is absolutely essential to its functioning. It’s sort of a mimetic split-level. Having your cake and eating it too has become its own set of conventions. When the desired pitch of comedy requires that the audience be brought in close and raw enough to feel the grit of discomfort, the superficial trappings of “documentary” are now institutionalized as a viable shortcut for getting us there. (The very convenient device of solo interviews comes as a bonus.) But that’s the full extent of it; none of those movies (or TV shows) are actually the least bit interested in thinking about documentaries per se, and so they bring nothing else about documentaries with them. In a present-day “mockumentary,” there is, generally, no filmmaker and no film.

Interestingly, Curb Your Enthusiasm is a close stylistic relative yet manages to do away with the baggage of the “documentary” device. It’s improv shot handheld without pretense, and that’s that. In Waiting for Guffman, by contrast, the camera is constantly bobbling around absurdly to telegraph handheldness because, since there’s no real “movie” in the movie, in they feel obligated to remind us superficially of the “movie” conceit. Spinal Tap has no such layers of conventionalized affectation. It is a fiction, but a single cohesive fiction. Style and content are unified.

This whole issue reminds me a bit of the fact that when sound film was introduced, filmmakers were slow to feel comfortable playing incidental music without identifying a source. We seem to be similarly slow now in getting acclimated to the idea of a non-diegetic handheld camera in improv comedy. John Cassavetes and others were doing that sort of thing in an artsy way decades earlier, so I’m not sure what the problem is. In any case, even the interviews and glances at the camera on The Office are ultimately processed as existential rather than filmic, right? People are always psychically aware of both a sympathetic audience and a humiliating judgmental audience loitering somewhere nearby in social hyperspace; letting the characters glance at each of these occasionally really has nothing to do with camera crews or documentaries. Likewise the solo interview segments tend to read as exactly what they are — strange interludes.

Okay okay, back to Spinal Tap.

Much credit must be given to the editors, Kent Beyda and Kim Secrist, for their excellent balance of the various layers of comedy, and sensitivity to all sorts of nuances. They show up on the commentary and are justly proud of their work. The funniest single beat in the movie, to me, is when Nigel is in the middle of complaining about the size discrepancy between the salami and the bread, and briefly falls silent as he tries to fold the salami around the edges of the bread, as though for just a moment he has become un-self-consciously wrapped up in the problem he is attempting to solve. Watch it closely and you’ll see that the moment has been entirely created in editing.

June Chadwick is perfect as the wrong-energy girlfriend and gives a really fine performance, improvising just as fluently as the rest of them in a non-“joking” role, arguably a harder trick to pull off. Ditto Fran Drescher, but that’s less noteworthy since we all know she’s The Nanny. And ditto Tony Hendra but yick. Why didn’t Christopher Guest ever hire June Chadwick again? Why is she teaching Alexander technique instead of acting? Maybe she didn’t have range. Or maybe it’s because she’s married to a top facelift surgeon (seems like she’s gotten a couple of freebies, too) and doesn’t need that acting career anymore.

It goes without saying, I think, that: Michael McKean seems like the most versatile wit and the most astute about managing the fiction; Christopher Guest gets all the funniest and most memorable moments because he’s willing to descend into such depths of self-involvement, but he also seems genuinely, possibly unpleasantly self-involved; and Harry Shearer seems to be working in a nerdier, less subtle tradition than the others — his contributions all strike me as a little too obviously “the line he just came up with” — but that kind of mild clunkiness suits the Ringo vibe.

This Criterion edition is notoriously rare and very out of print for many years. It is much coveted for the material exclusive to it: actual behind-the-scenes commentaries by cast and crew (where the currently available version only has an in-character joke commentary track), the 20-minute demo short made to pitch the film, and a generous selection of high-quality cut material, a good chunk of which does not appear in the similarly generous selection on the current DVD. This movie is an unusual case in that several of the “deleted scenes” seem to be considered, by those that have seen them, to be a very real part of the movie. The sequence where Bruno Kirby gets stoned and sings “All The Way,” and the scene where Artie Fufkin smashes an egg on his head feel like truly essential pendants. I think what I’m responding to here is again related to the uniquely inclusive quality of this movie’s make-believe. In most movies, deleted scenes are often things that, as it turns out, didn’t actually happen in the movie’s world. Not so here! Whether or not they were in the final cut of film, those are things that actually occurred on Spinal Tap’s Smell the Glove tour! They are historically every bit as real as the rest of the movie.

But hey, enough of my yakkin’!

Here’s the track for your Criterion soundtrack compilation: Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight, as heard at the start of the movie when the band is introduced, which is as close as this movie gets to a Main Title cue. Soundtrack is of course available.

Pointlessly full disclosure: my home-burned copy of the otherwise-totally-unobtainable Criterion edition is corrupted at exactly and only the spot corresponding to this snippet of music, so the above track was, by necessity, ripped from the MGM DVD instead, which I own legitimately – thus breaking my made-up rules for this cumulative soundtrack thing I’m doing. It unfortunately can be distinguished from the Criterion edition that it purports to be, in that it has crisper sound. Ah well!

January 4, 2009

11. Det sjunde inseglet (1957)

written and directed by Ingmar Bergman

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Criterion Collection #11.

i.e. The Seventh Seal. As you can plainly see above. Why, one must ask, was the Criterion edition made from a version of the film where the original title cards had been replaced with English ones? That doesn’t seem right.

I feel much as I did about the Rilke. This is a thing of beauty but not redemptive. It does end on a vague mystical note of redemption, but that’s hard to swallow, I’m afraid, after this movie about the implacable reality of death and the desperate, hopeless illusions we use to try to fight it off. The meaning of life, I think it tells me, is to go on living, try to be good, eat strawberries, enjoy yourself, and help other people if you can. That’s all well and good. But that’s just in the negative space: the movie is principally about the struggle against death, and the answer is: you will lose.

I KNOW, MAN. I’d like to place a request for more cute babies and less horror-of-nothingness-while-being-burned-at-the-stake in my art, please.

I am not asking for the right to bury my head in any sand. I am already fairly dedicated to the elimination of sand; I don’t need some movie dustbusting on me.

Really: I am not espousing escapism over relevance and substance. I want relevance and substance. In fact what I am saying is, to me, in keeping with the philosophy that art has a social obligation. What you put in your art is what you are putting into society. So why fatalism? Why try to lower that temperature when it’s already freezing cold out there?

Fear of death is not a social ill, a cause that can benefit from public airing, Dickens-style. It is simply the essence of human sadness. You can choose that as your subject but who’s going to want to watch that? People starved for candor, I guess. I for one am not starved for candor on this subject.

But who is, truly? Who out there can learn from this movie? Nobody is going to recognize themselves in the flagellants or the witch-burners and realize their error. Nobody is going to be surprised that, yes, man is mortal. Isn’t it a little self-congratulatory for us to say that this movie is profound because we’ve imagined it inspiring philosophical epiphanies in some flimsy straw men? What about me? Where’s my epiphany, Ingmar? We’re all of us that knight in the movie, fighting the good fight. Well, guess what-all he gets out of it.

YES. I KNOW, DUDE. And so does Ingmar, at this point.

I guess art like this serves not as a lesson or even a statement, but as a conversation-starter, which I realize is a ridiculous coffee-table term for what I mean. Casting this material into poetry and film and placing it in front of people gives them a way in on it if they need one, and gives them cues to explore it. I’ve just been there already. Haven’t most people?

Or: a movie like this is meant to be a comfort because it is a commiseration. If you look out your window and see this, fear not, for you are not alone. But I don’t buy that justification. I the individual say, “I am afraid of death.” A comforting, commiserating work of art would say “We all are. But that’s why you at least don’t need to feel alone.” This movie, on the other hand, says, “Afraid of death, eh? Here’s a story about a man who was afraid of death. He died, of course.”

I must acknowledge that the film, because it is thoughtful, makes space to address some of what I’m saying here. The film was inspired by a real medieval painting on a church wall, and within the film we actually see the cynical squire (representing me) asking the painter (representing Ingmar Bergman) why he paints death and disease on the wall instead of nicer things. Here’s his answer. You tell me whether or not this is satisfying:


1: Why all this daubing?
2: To remind people of death.
1: That won’t make them any happier.
2: Why make them happy? Why not scare them?
1: Then they won’t look at your picture.
2: Yes, they will. A skull is more interesting than a naked woman.
1: If you scare them…
2: They’ll think.
1: …then they think.
2. And are still more scared.
1: And fall into the arms of the priests.
2: That’s not my business.
1: You’re only painting your picture.
2: I paint life as it is. Then folk can do as they like.
1: That makes people angry.
2: Then I paint something funny. A man must live. At least till the plague takes him.
1: The plague. Ugh!

That’s fine as dialogue, but I want my artist to be coming from somewhere higher than that.

The painting that inspired Bergman was relevant to him but also quaint. But this movie is not quaint to me, so it needs more than a quaint justification.

And perhaps that’s my problem – I was reluctant to see it as quaint. Even though in nearly every respect other than subject matter it makes clear that it is something small, gentle and homey. Maybe the problem is simply that I am personally too afraid of death to savor this movie, which was never meant to be felt to the bone; just held in the hands and tasted like a piece of bread.

This was a lovely poem on the subject, rich and humane and satisfying to look at. But it’s a downer, and, being very much with it and feeling it insisting that I look annihilation in the eye, I kept having to ask why.


I’m writing this very raw as I think it. A couple of hours interval after the above I have this to say: I would have felt it was more wholesome if it hadn’t reached the ending. The conception of the knight, forever questing and resisting, and his squire, doing his cynical best to remain engaged with earthier things, was rich and gave me food for thought because it was about ways of living; ways of contending with the knowledge of death. If the film had ended while they were still alive, the moral to take away would have been about life. But the end of a film is the answer to a film. A story that begins is already teasing us with the question of how it will end; a closed narrative is at least as much about where it is going as it is about what happens on the way. A story about a man who wants not to die, but in the end dies, is not a story about living. Whereas the stories of our actual lives are indeed stories about living.

You can say: “The movie is exactly like life, in that the point is not where it’s going, because that’s a foregone conclusion; the point is what happens on the way there,” but if you say that, I disagree. Because what happens on the way there? Some scenes and vignettes relating obliquely to the question of the meaning of life and the inevitability of death. The drive of the film, the mechanism that makes it go, is simply a drive toward death, with the brakes on to no avail, as scenery goes by. I need to see life as more than that.


The central event of the plot, such as it is, doesn’t make philosophical sense. The knight saves the young family by distracting Death at the moment that they flee. This, we are led to understand, is the “one meaningful act” he hoped to make. But what can this act possibly represent? Doing good for others, obviously, but if that’s all we were to understand, shouldn’t the knight have, say, saved the witch’s life instead of just walked away and let her burn? Done some social good in the face of the crazed medieval culture of cruelty? Seemingly, the act of knocking over the chess pieces to buy the happy family some time to sneak away from death is supposed to represent something more specific than mere “good,” but in fact it can’t really represent anything. One’s chess game with Death is a completely personal affair, and Death’s attention is everywhere at once. Misdirecting Death so that someone else can sneak away simply makes no sense. If the Death of this film is the Black Death, the plague, there’s no saving another by getting the disease yourself. So what has the knight actually done, with his one meaningful act? It seems like a phony moment of drama, one that requires us to reduce the visual metaphor to a literal fantasy.

Which, incidentally, is how I very much wanted to watch this movie when it was shown in high school. A guy playing chess against Death is cool, right? But I ended up frustrated by the movie because it absolutely refuses to be watched as a ghost story.

Really, what it needs is to be seen as both at once. We must be thinking of “man vs. death” and also of a knight from a fairy tale up against a spook in a cape. It is allegory, but not pure enough allegory to actually watch as allegory. And it certainly can’t be watched as a story. It wants interpretation on levels that shift constantly. I find that very difficult. Perhaps a movie like this needs to be watched even more than the three times I gave it before one gets good at playing along with it. Well, that’s a lot to ask.

Commentary by Peter Cowie was smart and pleasant enough for what it was.

Soundtrack by Erik Nordgren – no, never released or rerecorded – is, like the film, rather theatrical in approach. Mostly made up of very short cues for transitions. The only longer pieces were heavily sound-effected up, so here’s the 24-second Main Title. Dies Irae!

December 21, 2008

10. Walkabout (1971)

directed by Nicolas Roeg
screenplay by Edward Bond
after the novel by James Vance Marshall (pseud. for Donald G. Payne) (1959, originally published as The Children)

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Criterion Collection #10.

A montage set to blissful music that cuts directly from a naked teenage girl to the fat bubbling up through the skin of a roasting lizard would be strong stuff even if it didn’t really mean it. But this movie really means it. This movie is strong stuff.

Yes, this movie is a noble-savage, return-to-Eden, industrial-civilization-makes-us-crazy type of movie. If you are of the mind that nobody selling anything of the sort should be given credence, you might not have patience for it. I am very much cynical about fantasies of reversion, and feel an instinctive defensiveness on behalf of industrial civilization when its values are snidely impugned. It’s easy to knock industrial civilization when you’re just sitting around with a beer – i.e. when you don’t really mean it – and that irritates me. But like I said, this movie really means it. It is not a hippie fantasy, nor does it actually espouse any kind of revolutionary shift in human behavior – it knows that’s impossible. It simply expresses a deep nostalgia for, and awareness of – or nostalgia for awareness of – man’s actual place in the violent, indifferent order of the cosmos. I can get behind that. And the movie put me behind it.

Several times I thought of the Camus I’ve read (The Stranger and The Plague) – the method was to make absurd anything that wasn’t “the truth,” simply by reminding us of the truth. Here, “the truth” was a sort of “living desert” nature documentary footage, which is heightened yet understated. Just like nature itself. It includes some unnerving stuff – like, yes, an incredible swarm of maggots devouring a carcass – and then other stuff that is simply handled so well that it becomes unnerving. Everything on the screen is either decaying, devouring, or defending itself.

Actually, to get back to the comment about nostalgia, I see the movie as being built on the tug of opposed nostalgias, or at least constructed so that you are able to sympathize with either pull, according to your personal inclination. The girl (who is the real protagonist of the movie) is never so enamored of the state of nature that she considers giving up civilization, but once she gets home, she’s no longer satisfied there either. The Aborigine boy who represents the state of nature is ruined by his desire, but inability, to connect with this girl, who I take to represent, in relation to him, the allure of a world ordered by man. The tragedy in the movie is not that modern man isn’t primitive anymore; it’s that the two ways of being cannot understand each other or strike any lasting compromise. In Roger Ebert’s essay, included in the box, he says that he sees the film as being about the failure of communication, which I suppose I agree with, but principally in terms of honest communication between the modern and the primitive within the soul of mankind. The girl comes off as reasonably sensitive and reasonably intelligent, but ultimately too reliant on standard proprieties to comprehend “the truth”; this is modern man. My comment about wanting to warn the people in A Night to Remember that they were being much too British, in light of nature’s indifference to their deaths, was here more or less the point of the movie.

That this essentially philosophical material works at all is a testament to craftsmanship; all the moreso that it works rather well. I have very great respect for Nicolas Roeg for pulling this off. Having this movie described to you would be absolutely and completely unlike watching it. That is a sign that poetry and craft are crucial to a work. It’s not always necessarily a compliment. In this case it’s a compliment.

The only Nicolas Roeg movie I’d seen prior to this was The Witches. I’m now very interested, if a bit nervous, to see his other movies.

The photography is lovely.

Many critics, I see, have talked about the mysterious aura about the film, but none of them have addressed something so I want to come out and say it. I think the specific casting of Jenny Agutter has a lot to do with the distinctive atmosphere. Her prettiness is of a particular type that is somehow reminiscent of the girls one is interested in at a distance in middle school. She doesn’t look at all glamorous, nor does she look ordinary; she is blankly, tentatively pretty. Also, the actress herself has clearly and remarkably been caught on film at exactly the moment of life being portrayed: newly aware of the potential to be a grown-up but not sure what to think of it. I see that some people have criticized the movie for leering at her, but I think that’s an important part of what’s at work. Lots of guys on the internet are not at all shy about expressing their lust for young Jenny Agutter, but they all seem to think it’s something they’re sneaking in under the table, and that maybe Nicolas Roeg was too. None of them seem to recognize that the tension of deciding whether you ought to think of her as a hot girl or not is an important (and presumably intentional) part of the movie. For me, a good part of the success of the film had to do with its ability, through her, to bring back memories of a certain time of life, a time at which the question of what it meant to be a person was vitally open. This may only be work for men. Though I would think that women could recognize themselves in her tentative self-possession, and be brought back to the same set of memories. Any thoughts, women who’ve seen Walkabout?

So here’s the key track from John Barry’s score, the central montage described above, which happens to be the only piece of music without dialogue over it in the film. The end credits track is essentially the same material, anyway. This track (called “Back to Nature” on the soundtrack LP) does have sound effects, I’m afraid, and to give you the album version would be to break my pattern of using rips directly from the film, so you have to live with the sounds of kangaroos being clubbed to death and lizards being impaled. I think the foley work in this film was fantastic and evocative, so it’s fitting that you should get a little of it here.

Without the movie, this piece of music falls easily into a certain category of 70s pseudo-classical silky Hollywood lovey-dovey junk, and doesn’t seem to have a lot going for it. But once the images have been seen, the music seems to soak up their conceptual essence; I’ve come to really like it. It’s like tunes I hear in dreams but then can’t successfully recreate, because the point wasn’t the music itself, it was the strangeness that infused it. The dreamy, spacey feel of the music in a lot of “normal” 70s movies – music that is, to me, often unintentionally unnerving and thus a little icky – here finds its philosophical match. This time, for once, the sounds of otherworldly rapture aren’t supposed to be comfortable or easy to take; their sleazy frictionless quality becomes part of the effect rather than just tacky period ambiance.

The whole film, I suppose, is similarly an honest, intellectually whole incarnation of 70s flakiness. I felt myself drawn inside a feeling that was familiar but usually easy to dismiss as having been an intellectual/aesthetic fad. Perhaps this movie was the source and I have only known the imitators; perhaps every muddled, superficial fashion of a period stems from a charismatic source that will age better than its offspring. Perhaps something becomes “dated” in inverse proportion to how intellectually whole it is. The culture of every age has its characteristic points of philosophical laziness; the objects that age poorly are those that obliviously embrace that laziness, which becomes glaring and obvious when the philosophical wind changes. But thoughtful work will survive no matter how of its time it seems. The great novels of the 19th century are still going strong despite being so 19th-century, whereas the advertisements, the jokes, the pulp of the 19th century all seem irredeemably quaint.

This movie was very 70s but it was not quaint.

I think I respond well to things that seem have had their own thoughts, but not to things that seem to simply be relaying received thoughts. Even if they’re the same thoughts.

The essentially sympathetic thing in art is the having of ideas, not ideas themselves.


Things that I feel obligated to mention to maintain consistency with other entries:
1. The commentary (Nicolas Roeg and Jenny Agutter, separately) is well worth hearing even if it’s not consistently interesting, for exposure to the two personalities, both of which are very much part of the film itself.
2. A soundtrack was released on LP but never yet reissued on CD.


Having drawn a connection to A Night to Remember, I’m inspired to note the recurring themes in the Criterion Collection thus far. A little look back at the first ten selections.

Grand Illusion, A Night to Remember, and Walkabout are all about disillusionment with civilization’s received wisdom; about the ways that we make an ASS out of U and MANKIND. They all practice, as I said, some form of Camus-style absurdism.

Amarcord and The 400 Blows are both about childhood, psychological coming-of-age, and the memory thereof. If you want to psychoanalyze, Beauty and the Beast is sort of a failed version of the same, complete with a spitefully phony “maturation” at the end, to complete the impression that the whole thing took place in the imagination of a spoiled child. At any rate, it’s sort of an insincere exhibit B in the “memories of childhood” category.

Seven Samurai, The Killer, and Hard Boiled were all about morality, about codes, compromises, and the ethical ambitions and struggles of individuals in relation to groups. But these issues were deeply deeply stylized. I personally feel pretty cynical about the simple way that the phenomenon of “morality” is often depicted – up to and including the noir attitude that a less-than-black-and-white “morality” is something really grim and mature. The fact that all the movies here selling that line were actually about, you know, exciting fights and stuff, feeds my cynicism. They were also all Asian, so, as I said a few entries ago, who knows.

If you want to stand even further back, all three of the thematic groupings above could be characterized as being about a loss of innocence/loss of faith. In pretty much all of the movies thus far, I could identify a loss of faith at play.* And that’s the ur-story of the 20th century, right? You know, I hate it when cultural critics talk this way, but I’ve worked myself up to it and I can see what they’re saying. Or, in this case, what I’m saying.

Of course, there is one odd man out here that I’ve been avoiding. The Lady Vanishes is really and truly about a Lady Vanishing. Not coincidentally, it is probably the only one of these movies I would have liked as a kid.

I.E. PRIOR TO MY LOSS OF FAITH.

No, just kidding.

Er, I guess.

* In Beauty and the Beast, it takes place in kitschy retrograde.


That was supposed to be the end of this entry except it occurs to me now, later, that The Lady Vanishes actually fits rather well into the “don’t be so sure, civilized man!” category, considering its rather explicit message that foolish British complacency is oblivious to nasty realities. Its characters, traveling through political danger zones in the seeming safety of their luxurious train, need to be seriously shaken before they see that they are not immune to the outer world, and in the end find themselves holed up in the compromised train, fighting for their lives. It has lots in common with A Night to Remember. I missed that when I did the round-up above, I guess, because I would have understood it as a kid, free of “meanings.”

December 3, 2008

9. 辣手神探 (1992)

directed by John Woo
story by John Woo
screenplay by Barry Wong

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Criterion Collection #9: Hard-Boiled. Or Hard Boiled without the hyphen. Depends who you ask.

辣 = laat = hot/cruel
手 = sau = hand
[辣手 = ruthless]
神 = san = god
探 = taam = detective

Laat sau san taam = “Ruthless Supercop” – though you’ll frequently see this given as “Hot-Handed God of Cops” which is really silly. According to wikipedia, the title is intentionally identical to the first part of the Chinese title of Dirty Harry, 辣手神探夺命枪, which they give as the asyntactic “Hot-Handed God of Cops Killer Gun.” Better would be “Ruthless Supercop’s Deadly Gun,” I guess. Or, if you prefer, “Dirty Harry.”

Immediately it is clear that this film is superior to The Killer. That’s not the general opinion but it’s mine. I can enjoy this movie much more easily than The Killer because it never lets up enough to have to get anything right. It doesn’t have to know anything about anything – that’s the downfall of movies like this. Your challenge, Mr. Woo, is to fill your allotted 90 minutes with only things you care about. Those include: jumping back in slow motion with a gun in each hand. Those do not include: people. In The Killer, not nearly enough screen time was spastic. Here we come closer.

Both of these movies remind me of the movies I would make with the family video camera when I was about 13: absolutely every shot is an obligation to be awesome. Woo never fails to reveal the epic intensity of, say, walking down a hallway. The moviemaking reminds me of my imagination at an even younger age, when I was always straining to find ways that mundane moments could seem loaded and thrilling – and then lazily settling for whatever presented itself. I would become fixated on some silly little kinetic event I could rig up – like a paper cup falling off a table – and then would imagine it invested with hugely suspenseful significance. When this cup falls off the table, a man is going to die, and he’s watching as it rolls closer and closer… oh no! oh no! there it goes NOOOO! IN SLOW MOTION!!!! NOOOOO!!!!

Or even just turning the pages of a book, if I slowed it down enough and gave it imaginary foreboding in my mind, could start to seem like something out of some kind of intense, Hitchcockian movie. Oh my god when he gets to the next page a guy’s going to die NOOOOO!

Well, that very scene happens in Hard Boiled. And it’s everything a fourth-grader would want it to be.

But this is not actually good enough. It might sound like I’m saying John Woo has stayed true to a childlike exuberance. I’m not saying that. I’m saying it seems like a fourth-grader made this movie. I don’t see any reason why John Woo couldn’t maintain those enthusiasms yet have the discrimination of an adult, the self-discipline to admit that, actually, a paper cup falling off a table just isn’t really cool.

Okay, enough of this sort of talk. It sounds like I don’t get it. But no, I really do. I get it. The movie is trash cinema and its admirers love it that way. It’s a “flick.” It’s fun because it’s all secondhand – or, really, threehundredthhand – and it’s been made by and for people who are just there for junk food served hot; your way, right away. These action scenes weren’t made to reflect the human condition; they were made to top other action scenes from other movies. Like when every opera had to have a revenge aria and a love aria and a ballet because that was just what was expected; the audience has flopped itself down at the great cultural diner and ordered “the usual.” The movie isn’t trying to impress us with artistry or ingredients; it just wants us to say “holy moley look how many fries they piled on there this time! Goddamn I love fries.” The quality of the food is beside the point – I mean, I guess it’s fine here, but we don’t really notice anymore. We just like this place for the atmosphere, and because everybody knows our name.

So all I can say is: this Chinese diner is crazy. They put the pickle IN the soup, and the burger came with TEN patties.

Or, slightly to the side of that silly metaphor: Watching these movies has been like heeding the word-of-mouth hype about a fast-food burger place, off the beaten path, that you absolutely have to try. You finally go and… yeah, maybe that’s better than other fast-food burgers. Or… maybe it isn’t. Hard to tell because it’s just a fast-food burger. Now you have to run back through your memory to remember who those people were gave you this recommendation. It was… oh yeah, The Criterion Collection. Well, everybody’s entitled. But will The Criterion Collection take my recommendations of, say, old Commodore 64 games? Probably not.

I would be remiss, though, if I did not concede that there are a really tremendous number of fries on there. You will not want for fries. The body count in this movie is incredible. Stuff blows up and people get shot with heartfelt fourth-grade inventiveness that never ever wavers. The entire second half of the movie, in a sense, is a single Die Hard-like sequence of escalating blow-up-itude. It does not let itself down. And a movie really living up to its own standards, whatever they are, can in itself be a satisfying thing.


Well, wow, now I’ve listened to the commentary track and I’m not sure I get it after all. I mean, I’m still sure, but I had to have a crisis of conscience first. These guys do not agree with what I said above. Or, wait, do they?

No question it’s an interesting listen. We have auteur John Woo himself, producer Terence Chang, critic Dave Kehr (now of the New York Times), and last but not least, Roger Avary, the guy who co-wrote Pulp Fiction and directed The Rules of Attraction and Killing Zoe – here, recorded in 1993, representing the Quentin Tarantino video store clerk contingent at the height of its relevance.

The commentary track is sort of like Being There. John Woo sounds very much like a guy who might make this movie, saying stuff like “I had Tequila shoot this tiny target from across the room so that at the end, when he shoots the bad guy through the eye, it’s credible,” and Chang corroborates the impression that the shoot mostly consisted of discussions about how much explosive to use and where to put it. Surrounding them, though, you have on the one hand Dave Kehr comparing Woo to Orson Welles and talking about the thematic depth and subtlety of his work, and in the other corner you have the geeknik, Roger Avary, excitedly noting how exhilaratingly confusing and secondhand the movie is, and declaring that such is the wave of the future.

I just invented “geeknik.”

Anyway, Dave Kehr, who seems perfectly intelligent, gave me pause. His conviction that these movies were deeply accomplished and genuinely significant – Criterion Collection-worthy, even – made me stop and reconsider my attitude. Was I being a boor and missing the boat? Was there really some kind of humanism in this? I just couldn’t see my way to it. I mean, just look! Look at the movie you’re talking about! Eventually Kehr says something that put my mind at ease: he talks about the eye-opening thrill, for American audiences, of seeing such well-worn themes and archetypes being used sincerely and “not as kitsch” – being embraced and utilized without any kind of ironic remove. Well, no question these movies are very, very sincere. But that’s exactly what real kitsch is. Manufactured camp is, no question, a depressing cultural phenomenon; let us please not conflate it with genuine camp, which is sincere and clueless. Kehr’s point seemed to be that the ridiculous sentimentality of these movies is actually redeemed and given new life because it is unafraid and heartfelt. But that’s just the slippery sincerity slope talking – you can have that same experience if you stare too long at a Hummel. There’s a sand trap there in your heart; beware! In general, though, I believe that Kehr’s real mistake was confusing impact with quality, stimulation with value. As many contemporary museum artists do. Maybe some people are comfortable with equating those things, but I stand firmly against that thinking.

Meanwhile, Roger Avary makes the whole Tarantino attitude seem shallow and confused (and also implicitly endorses my comments about The Killer) when he says that he enjoys these Hong Kong films because they are so blatantly derivative of Western cinema cliches… and that he is drawn to the blatantly derivative because his generation was born into a culture surrounded by prior culture… and that he and his ilk are therefore inclined to create cinema defined by its references and relations to existing cinema. But this is a superficial parallel drawn between two cultures with very different problems. America is coughing its way through soul-stifling inundation with its own accumulated cultural pile-up – anxiety of influence on a massive scale. Hong Kong, on the other hand, is using this stuff in a totally different socio-psychological way: it wants to be famous and lucky, like the West, and thereby save itself. The movies in question are aspirationally derivative, because the East is naively trying to remake itself in the West’s image, but better. Quentin and Roger’s movies, on the other hand, are willfully derivative, because of America’s cultural suffocation, where exponential garden-variety provincial cultural inbreeding has given way to inbreeding chic. In 90s California, fetishistic navel-gazing is IN. 1991 Hong Kong, I feel certain, knows no such phenomenon.

I guess I will concede the basic point being made by these admirers of the movie, which is that when you watch it, you are impressed by its spirit and energy. But that can mean so many things. I was impressed with it as one is impressed with a child who wears a Power Rangers costume, with mask, out to dinner. “How peculiar it must be to be you!” you think. “If you weren’t like this, I would never get to see this crazy thing I’m seeing.” Is that really enough? That’s the appeal of “outsider art,” but this isn’t outsider art – this is a product of mass culture for a mass audience. But mass culture can get pretty crazy. I would show this movie at a party.

And that reminds me of one last comment I wanted to make. These two movies were the sort of thing that other kids somehow saw. Kids who were less attentively parented than I. But occasionally those things crept in anyway, at sleepovers and other unchaperoned parties. To me these movies were evocative of middle school sleepovers, of my fleeting encounters with the world of things that people who thought I was lame thought were cool. Things that made me feel morally itchy. I have a friend who told me that when she was younger, her parents were not opposed to her seeing sex or violence per se, but that they attempted to protect her from movies with “a seedy worldview.” Yes.

At heart, these movies do not actually have a truly seedy worldview, but they very much want to, which makes them perfect fare for kids who are looking to get a sense of worldliness from something forbidden. Somewhere online I found a comment, surely (hopefully) from a seventh-grader, to the effect that Hard Boiled is way more hardcore and awesome than other action movies because there is so much spurting blood and so many innocent bystanders get killed. To the movie’s way of thinking – and Dave Kehr’s, I guess – that’s actually what makes it so sad. But the movie is in profound agreement with the kids at the sleepover party that it is also hardcore, and so it is well suited to them.

These days, it seems like whenever I see an anonymous bad guy get riddled with bullets and flop over, some kind of prudish widower in my soul perversely insists that I think about his life up to that point, his relatives, his individual personality, the fact that he probably didn’t expect that would be the last day of his life, etc. etc. (This is the same smug parade-raining jerk who makes me look everywhere but at the trick when watching magicians. Dammit.) So I sort of imagined that my younger self would have been horrified and upset by these movies. But Star Wars is full of guys getting casually killed and flopping over, and I cheerfully watched those movies over and over as a kid. So this might not have bothered me as much as I imagine, in retrospect, that it would have. In any case, I was never at this particular sleepover. By 1993 I guess I was too old.

The Criterion disc (long out of print, but I obtained!) also contains previews for all of John Woo’s other Hong Kong films, going back to 1973. Watching the evolution of this particular brand of junk over two decades is fascinating and amusing, and certainly provides plenty of grist for the conversation about the developmental status of Asian cultural identity. And some funny subtitle translations.

Music for Hard Boiled is by jazz composer Michael Gibbs and is wonderfully typical of a genre action movie from the late eighties/early nineties. I can’t help but smile at stuff like this. I’m giving you the end titles, which is a reuse of music from earlier in the movie – a track referred to on the soundtrack album as “Red Car Boogie,” because it accompanies the first appearance of Tony Leung as he drives a red car, indicating that he is a hotshot. As for the “boogie” part – well, you can hear for yourself! Boogie on, 1992!